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Comment: Ferdinand Mount: Stalins ghost sits too easily among us

They miss him still, you know, they really do. It was the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death last Wednesday, and the Russian parliament spent the day happily debating a motion to turn Volgograd back into Stalingrad. An opinion poll reported that more than half the population thought that Uncle Joe had been a benefit to Russia.

Here in Britain it is a pity that Stalin’s most devoted admirer, Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian and former master of Balliol college, Oxford, should have died nine days earlier. For he would surely have given us a second epitaph to rival his ringing words on Stalin’s death in 1953: “He was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in all countries will always be deeply in his debt.”

Only this week it has emerged that Stalin might have had some reason to return Dr Hill’s gratitude. For the